Brexit discussion thread XIII (Please read OP before posting)

ambro25 wrote: »

Many services (particularly of the financial and legal varieties) cease to be sellable into the EU27 outright from 01.01.21, any tariffs and/or mountains of NTBs (on products and other services) notwithstanding.

In that particular respect, I don't expect the national symphony of millions of tiny violins playing across UK service industries, to manage to out-play the mongo-clanging of pennies dropping the length and breadth of the UK throughout 2021.

Services are not tied up in trade deals. The EU will decide (yes, decide) whether or not to grant the UK equivalence in services and this will dictate how the services are treated.

Who holds all the cards again?

McGiver wrote: »

Not that the EU isn't already well served in this matter by Ireland, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Switzerland (all which are tax havens and/or OFCs to hide profits and/or assets).

Point of info: Switzerland isn't in the EU, and doesn't benefit from financial passporting, so until now has channelled that business through ... London.

McGiver wrote: »

Switzerland is de facto in the EEA but I didn't know they primarily used London (incl Jersey Guernsey) for their flows.

Given the tax haven nexus in place, where will the Swiss banking (including shadow banking) sector divert the flows now?

There's no sense of "London" which includes Jersey and Guernsey.

In so far as Jersey and Guernsey have a financial services industry, they have it because they are not part of the tax and regulatory regime that applies in the UK (including London). Neither Jersey nor Guernsey are part of the UK.

McGiver wrote: »

UK is a tax haven and offshore financial centre (OFC), to a certain degree. Especially its Crown dependencies Jersey, Guernsey, Virgin Islands etc. Maybe there's some interest in that?

Not that the EU isn't already well served in this matter by Ireland, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Switzerland (all which are tax havens and/or OFCs to hide profits and/or assets).

None of Ireland, The Netherlands, Luxembourg or Switzerland classify as tax havens nowadays.

None of them are any use to 'hide' profits and/or assets, either.

They're fiscally more competitive/efficient in certain niche/specialised respects, relative to other 'mainstream' EU jurisdictions, as a result of historical choices and/or governmental development model and/or (increasingly-) acquired excellence of the local set of specialist service providers.

But the days of secret bank accounts and untraceable transfers are long, long behind them all, as peer nation-level (and EU) pressure continually and gradually erodes these niche/specialised advantages.

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Blessed are the cheesemakers

The UK Japan trade deal has hit a small snag over a triflingly small sum
Given how much the Japanese value Face this is not good news.

It looks like spin is now more important than substance.

That's the point. That's why it's (from the UK government's point of view) good news.

Face or no face, the Japanese will almost certainly give her what she wants, precisely because UK exports of blue cheese to Japan are so trivial. It will cost the Japanese nothing, nothing at all, to hand her a "win" on this, and she can use the "win" to gratify Brexiters of the Daily Mail persuasion, and therefore to distract from more signficant, and less beneficial, features of the Japanese deal. When people point out that the UK/Japan trade deal is lousier for the UK than the EU/Japan trade deal which the UK loses by Brexiting, Brexit supporters will point to the blue cheese clause and imagine that by doing so they have refuted the claim. Some of them will genuinely imagine this and others will know that it is nonsense but, either way, the distraction is acheived. And that is Truss's object.

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

It looks like spin is now more important than substance.

Where Brexit is concerned, when was this ever not the case?

Not content with a world-beating mishandling of the Covid healthcare emergency for the past 5 months, with this morning's news they find themselves with a world-beating recession for the first time in 11 years, after the worst quarterly increase in unemployment ever (blink-and-you'll-miss-it reported yesterday).

And of course, Brexit has yet to really hit, with about 150-odd days to go since they did not see fit to extend the WA...

...so they agitate the populace about some dinghies full of the wrong sorts of people like it's the summer of 2015 all over again, and jump at every other distracting opportunity (see e.g. Prity Patel's Tweet-war with Ben & Jerry's ice cream outfit).

This spin über alles model of governance will get worse -and worser- the closer we get to December.

johnnyskeleton wrote: »

At a guess, I would imagine the Japanese refused zero tarrifs with the EU on cheese because they consider it necessary to protect that market.

I think not really. There basically is no market for blue cheese in Japan.

The main fact to bear in mind here is that the Japanese don't consume a lot of dairy products; of the dairy products they do consume cheese forms only a small part; and of they cheese they consume blue cheese forms a tiny fraction. They don't like blue cheese, basically, and struggle to understand why anyone would eat it. Dairy in the Japanese diet is almost entirely the result of the americanisation of Japanese tastes. So it's ice-cream, cheesecake and mozaralla on pizzas. Stinky cheese, not so much.

So the barrier to selling blue cheese to Japan is not the tariffs, and tariff reduction/abolition won't result in much in the way of extra sales. Hence the EU might have asked for tariff reduction as a way of signalling to French farmers that their concerns are not unnoticed, but we wouldn't have spent bargaining credit in pressing for it; we'd have focused on tariff reductions on things that, but for tariffs, we could actually sell in Japan.

johnnyskeleton wrote: »

Also, i have heard, though I accept that I havent read the full 600 page document, that if either Japan or the EU offers better trade terms to a third country, then it triggers a review for the other i.e. if they give the Uk better trade terms on cheese then they must ultimately give the same terms to the EU.

Yes, there is something to that effect in the EU/Japan deal, though I'm not sure of the precise terms. But (a) I think the provision wouldn't operate unless the EU invoked it, and (b) if the EU did invoke it, Japan would not be greatly bothered; the Japanese have no more appetite for French or Italian blue cheese than they do for British.

brexit seems to be never ending wins, the stats are quite astounding

https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1293427294833463296

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Blessed are the cheesemakers

The UK Japan trade deal has hit a small snag over a triflingly small sum
Given how much the Japanese value Face this is not good news.

It looks like spin is now more important than substance.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53737388

Anyone remember the cheese speech ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_wkO4hk07o

Quantitative cheesing

On the day that the UK goes into the worst recession in Europe and the week Britain prepared for the sea border, just a reminder that “expert” Ray Bassett appears to be flogging a new book to the converted by giving serials to the Daily Express.

He literally claims the opposite of what actually happened, happened.

It’s almost psychotic.

Must be paying the bills with this nonsense.



https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1321743/brexit-news-boris-johnson-leo-varadkar-ireland-backstop-eu-theresa-may-withdrawal



However, it supports my theory that Johnson is there to claim “victory” and sell it to the plebs, but has always planned to go ahead with the original withdrawal deal

Imreoir2 wrote: »

The UK can produce all the Champagne they like after the 31st, but the can't sell it in the EU market with that lable.

. . . or into any market which has a free trade deal with the EU that includes protection of geographical indicators.

The EU has the largest network of free trade deals the world has ever seen, and reciprocal protection of geographical indicators is a standard EU ask in negotiating any trade deal. So that's an awful lot of markets that are closed to English "champagne".

In itself, this doesn't matter a great deal. England doesn't produce a lot of sparkling wine and, if they did, who in his right mind would buy English sparkling wine, no matter how it was labelled?

But obviously there are other products that the UK does or could produce that might resemble EU products protected by a geographical indication. There's no reason why the UK can't produce feta-type cheese, say, or Parma-type ham. Absent a UK/EU trade deal, there is nothing to stop them labelling those products as feta cheese and Parma ham when sold in the UK market, or in any market that doesn't protect EU geographical indicators. And there are still substantial markets which don't, the US being the most obvious. (For now, at any rate.)

Still, this provides limited opportunities. UK producers could sell Parma ham in the US, but so can US producers - they already do. American consumers might be prepared to pay a premium for Parma ham from your actual Parma, but not for Parma ham from Peasmarsh. And I doubt the UK producers can compete with US producers on price in the US market.

Sam Russell wrote: »

James O'Brien thinks geographical indicators will not apply after 1st Jan - well I think he may find that EU producers might make Stilton cheese or Scotch Whiskey, but the UK producers will still be prohibited from producing Champagne or Gorganzlla.

So we in Ireland can make Stilton although people in Stilton cannot! (Stilton cheese can only be made in an area that does not include Stilton).

An Claidheamh wrote: »

“expert” Ray Bassett appears to be flogging a new book to the converted by giving serials to the Daily Express.

He literally claims the opposite of what actually happened, happened.

It’s almost psychotic.

Must be paying the bills with this nonsense.

You'd have to wonder what kind of Kompromat Brexiters have on Ray Bassett - how can someone go from being an Irish ambassador, to spouting the deluded nonsense that he goes on with?

It can't surely be that it's just all about money, or, maybe worse, that he actually believes what he's saying?

Wikipedia wrote:

Ray Bassett ... served as an ambassador from Ireland to Canada, Jamaica, and the Bahamas and joint Secretary to the British–Irish Intergovernmental Conference in Belfast. He is senior fellow for EU affairs at Policy Exchange.

and

Wikipedia wrote:

Policy Exchange is a UK-based centre-right think tank ... It has been described in The Daily Telegraph as "the largest, but also the most influential think tank on the right".
...
Policy Exchange was set up in 2002 by a group including Nicholas Boles, Michael Gove and Francis Maude.
...
Think tank Transparify, which is funded by the Open Society Foundations, ranked Policy Exchange as one of the three least transparent think tanks in the UK in relation to funding. Transparify's report "How Transparent are Think Tanks about Who Funds Them 2016?" rated them as 'highly opaque,' one of 'a handful of think tanks that refuse to reveal even the identities of their donors.'Website 'WhoFundsYou?' rate Policy Exchange as 'E', the lowest score out of five for funding transparency.

It's not just Johnson. Brexiters generally spend the best part of two years maintaining that various border controls and restrictions as between RoI and NI would not be a "hard border", remember. All that's happening here is the application of the same logic. Johnson has promised that thre will be no border down the Irish sea; therefore whatever controls, restrictions, delays or costs are imposed on goods crossing the Irish sea cannot be considered to be a "border". because that is the only way in is Johson's promise can be, or was ever going to be, honoured.

The DUP are in a particularly invidious position. Having, for reasons known only to them and their therapists, backed a hard Brexit and denied that controls on the RoI/NO border would amount to a hard border, they cannot really turn around and object that the same controls on the NI/GB border amount to a hard border. My heart doesn't bleed for them, though.

Sam Russell wrote: »

Look at the words used: He says that NI will have unfettered access to England, Scotland and Wales - there will not be a border down the Irish Sea. [Of course, he was speaking from NI - and from there, there will not be a border].

Now from England, Scotland and Wales there will most certainly be a border down the Irish Sea, whether going directly or through Dublin. The customs declarations, inspections, etc. will be quite evident to all.

Was it a lie, or was it spin, or was it confusing?

It was a lie infused with spin I believe. At the start that border will be invisible, but once other countries start objecting at the WTO to the open access of the EU via Ireland to the UK market that invisible border will become visible very quickly.

Spanish Eyes wrote: »

Seems to me that no one in the UK/NI is in the least worried about Brexit at all.

Based on what evidence?

People you have spoken to? News coverage?

I still see a lot of traffic in relation to it on Twitter.

Tell me how wrote: »

Based on what evidence?

People you have spoken to? News coverage?

I still see a lot of traffic in relation to it on Twitter.

Twitter? ok .

Covid has buried Brexit now.